Gee Williams’ recent collection of short stories, Blood etc, is not the ghoulish or bloody and gut-wrenching example of pure horror the title might suggest. Instead we are presented with quite an odd assortment of short stories concerned with the hidden thoughts and secret conversations of various characters who get pushed to the background of everyday life. The controlled and subtle inner rage of Williams’ characters is inferred rather than being hurled to centre stage in a graphic display of violence.

The blurb describes the collection’s subject as, ‘People and the promises they make and break’. The various characters do seem to foster romanticised versions of themselves, and fail miserably in their attempts to realise them. So really, the author is making a statement through her characters about how ordinary people become trapped in socially constructed forms of behaviour. This results in an exploration of the coping mechanisms people employ to sweep their personal problems under the proverbial mat and disguise their true motivations and hidden agendas towards other characters.

The opening short story has a characteric quality of being fairly floaty and meandering in its narrative structure, with a stream of consciousness style to the writing. The author’s background as a playwright is hinted at in the slightly anecdotal nature of many of the character’s inner thoughts that are narrated as asides to the main body of the story.

Perhaps surprisingly, there are anti-feminist tinges to many of the male narrated stories. In the opening short story a husband is effectively emasculated by his wife’s new found independence. This is in light of his new responsibility as the ‘stay at home Dad’, and the less of his earlier role as the main family breadwinner. His weakened gender status is then compared to the thriving female figure of his wife (now a successful businesswoman).

Some of the stories are so subtle that you really have to read between the lines in order to dig out the crux of its particular issue and the hidden identity of its chosen narrator and this it may be argued is the author’s downfall. In this respect, perhaps the writing would have been more interesting if the stories were not so isolated from each other and held a more closely related theme with each consecutive story.

As a result, what you’re eventually left with is a mixed bag of stories which have no obvious bearing on one another and predictably stick to a common theme involving people who are unhappy with their lives and remain powerless to change anything about them for the better.